Excerpt: Need to Know - The Hub Canada

The following is an excerpt from the twice weekly Need to Know roundup from The Hub Canada

Check out the full roundup here.

The NDP must return to its working-class roots

By Ryan Painter, a principal at Rhino Public Relations and Strategy and a former political strategist and campaign manager for the NDP

After years of bleeding support and abandoning its working-class roots to favour urban academic identity politics, the NDP under Jagmeet Singh was reduced to a historical footnote. In the 2025 federal election, the party won just seven seats, falling short of the 12-seat threshold required for official party status in the House of Commons. That’s not just a bad night; that’s a historic collapse.

To put this in perspective, the party never dropped this low even during the NDP’s darkest days, under leaders like Alexa McDonough or Audrey McLaughlin. The Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), the NDP’s predecessor, managed more than this during the Cold War. In fact, the CCF’s first election as a party in 1935 resulted in them winning seven seats.

The NDP still held nine seats even in the 1993 wipeout that saw the PCs annihilated and the Reform Party surge. This is a new rock bottom.

Losing official party status means the NDP loses funding for research staff, speaking time, and the ability to participate meaningfully on committees. They’ve been relegated to the political penalty box, shouting from the sidelines while the grown-ups make the decisions. The party that once brought Medicare, national affordable housing, and the Canada Pension Plan to the national stage now finds itself irrelevant, by its own hand.

Here’s the hard truth: Canada needs a strong NDP. But not this NDP.

Not a party obsessed with X discourse and boutique causes while ignoring the economic pain felt by working Canadians. If there’s a future for the NDP, it won’t be found in gender pronoun workshops or anti-Israel rallies waving Hamas flags—it’ll be found in union halls, mill towns, and apartment blocks, talking about wages, rent, debt, and real-life struggles.

Maybe, just maybe, this humiliation will wake them up. If not, the NDP risks joining the Rhinoceros Party in the history books—as a quirky political relic that forgot who it was.